Eleven Things I Promised

by Catherine Clark

  CHAPTER 1

  I must be crazy. That was all I could think as a white, slightly dented van from Rocco’s Ink Den pulled up in front of my house at seven in the morning. I’m not really about to do this, am I?

  This was different when Stella and I planned on doing it together.

  Her parents were going to drive us to the start in Bangor, Maine. The ride went from there along coastal Maine through New Hampshire and then finished in Boston. Stella’d had it all figured out. How we wouldn’t have to hang out with our school bike group all the time, because a few of them were pretty annoying. How after the ride we’d spend a day or two in Boston being tourists and recovering. But now it was just me, standing by my driveway with my mom, who, no joke, was wearing a robe and slippers because it was Sunday and she didn’t have to get ready for work.

  A lot had happened since Stella’s accident, but the upshot of it was that I was headed off on the seven-day, three-hundred-fifty-mile Cure Childhood Cancer Ride without her.

  The van’s passenger door opened, and Max Modella climbed out. “You ready?” he asked. Max, with his shoulder-length hair and muscular, tattooed arms, looked more like a twenty-five-year-old than one of my classmates. I guess that’s what happens when your uncle owns the tattoo parlor in town.

  He could make a plain white T-shirt look hot, the way underwear models do. That’s all I know. Something about his angular nose and cheekbones. He had about a dozen girlfriends at school; I couldn’t keep track of who was current. His uncle Rocco had offered to drive us to the ride’s start, and since he had a full-size van and a trailer that could hold our eight bikes, we’d accepted.

  “Hey. Your hair?” Max asked. “Was it like that before?”

  I wheeled my bike toward Max, declining to answer the question. As of this morning at about one a.m., my hair was bleached blond. Two days before, it had been lightish brown, which went a lot better with my lightish-brown skin.

  Max was a laid-back guy who tended not to keep up on the details. Once our American history class moved classrooms, and he didn’t catch on until halfway through the term. He kept going to the old room, the way a dog will do if you move across town.

  “Well, can we have your stuff?” he asked. “Blondie?”

  “Don’t call me that,” I told him as I followed him to the bike trailer. I tried to lift the bike into it, but I got it only as far as my shoulders. The trailer was way too tall for me. While I was struggling to lift the bike higher—it really didn’t weigh that much, which made it even more embarrassing that I was about to be crushed—Max lifted it easily out of my hands.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Max said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Blondie,” he added again.

  I shook my head, grabbed my duffel and sleeping bag, and stowed them in the back of the van, jamming them in on top of everyone else’s. My bike helmet was attached to the duffel bag’s handles, a shocking neon green that nobody could miss. Kind of like my new hair color.

  Now what? I’d asked the mirror as I stood there, water dripping onto my shoulders. Do I have to bleach my eyebrows to match? Or . . . anywhere else?

  I hurried back to say a quick good-bye to my mom. She’d packed a giant cooler full of snacks for the team. She’d stayed up half the night baking granola bars and brownies and muffins. I knew, because I’d stayed up just as long, packing and repacking. She was so tired she hadn’t even commented on my hair except to say, “Hm, nice, you can do that sort of thing when you’re young.”

  I had to give Mom credit. For someone who really didn’t want me to go on this trip, she was being very supportive.

  “Here, I got you something. The girl at the Bike Barn said it’s the one thing every cyclist should have.” She handed me a small paper bag, and I pulled out a complicated gizmo with about a dozen different levers and functions.

  “So what does this do?” I asked, turning the metal tool over and over in my hand.

  “It’s a wrench? I don’t know,” she said. “I really have no idea. I asked for a recommendation.” She laughed and gave me a hug. I had to try really, really hard not to cry. I’m terrible at good-byes, and looking at the tears running down my mother’s cheeks, I had a good idea where I’d inherited that trait.

  “Mom, it’s going to be fine,” I said, brushing my eyes. “We’re fine.”

  “I know—but—but—” she stammered as she sobbed.

  “You said butt,” I told her, which got her to laugh. “You said but-but, actually. Which seems like as good a time as any for me to leave.” I gave her another quick hug. “Promise me you’ll check in on Stells for me.”

  “I will. And you, be safe,” she said as I turned around to climb into the van. I knew what she meant. Stay on the side of the road. Way, way over. Look out for cars. Don’t let the same thing happen to you that happened to Stella.

  Inside the van, Autumn Daye (yes, that’s her real name) and Alex Nelson were sitting in the very back row, all wrapped around each other, as per usual. Not only were they never apart, they were the typical football player/cheerleader combination. It was like they were following a script.

  Margo Maloney—my archnemesis since we fought over the same doll stroller at preschool—Will Oxendale, and Elsa Stevenson were in the third-row seat. Cameron Cruz sat on the small second-row seat where I was to join him.

  They all stared at me. “Uh, morning,” I said. “Ignore my mom and her robe.” I perched on the bench seat, holding my small bag close to me.

  Cameron waved hello, while simultaneously nodding to the music he was listening to through white earbuds. Autumn and Alex glanced up at me, then went back to snuggling and talking about their plans for high school domination. Typical. They were the power couple at Sparrowsdale High. I was just a regular person.

  “What did you do to your hair?” demanded Margo, wrinkling her tiny nose. She really did have the most perfect nose on the planet. And small ears, too. She reminded me of a chipmunk. Tiny, quick, and hyperactive.

  “I like your hair,” said Will. “I think it’s rather avant-garde. A bit cheeky, even.” He was from England, an exchange student for spring term, and his British accent made him sound smarter than the rest of us. Trust me. We were in English Lit together, and if he raised his hand to make the exact same comment I did, somehow he’d get an “Exactly!” and I wouldn’t.

  “It’s nothing. Don’t mention it, actually,” I said, lowering my shoulders, wanting to shrink for a minute.

  “Well, why did you do it if you didn’t want people to notice it?” Margo asked.

  “Oh, I just felt like it,” I said. It was a long story, one I wasn’t about to go into with her. Though we’d supposedly been friends for a minute when we were in preschool (before the doll stroller incident), we’d never liked each other, even though we were on the same dance team, the Shooting Sparks, for two years. We hadn’t spoken much at all since we both outgrew the team. Margo had her friends, and I had mine. Mostly, I had Stella.

  “Never mind. I thought Stella was going to come see us off,” Margo said, leaning forward and looking around the yard, as if Stella would be hiding in the bushes outside my house or something.

  “Oh, she was going to. She planned on it,” I lied. “But then she got a last-minute doctor’s appointment this morning.”

  “At seven?” Margo scoffed.

  “It’s an, uh, it’s an MRI. For her leg. To see how it’s healing. They do those early, I guess.” I shrugged. I was used to making excuses for her. I’d been saying things like, She’s self-conscious about her facial injuries, and She has a meeting with the police today to reconstruct the accident, and Her parents are being really protective and won’t let her go out.

  None of them were true.

  The truth was, her injuries were a lot more serious than she wanted anyone to know. She wouldn’t want to be here to see off this group.

  “I’m pretty sure they can do MRIs any time of day,” Margo replied. “My brother b
roke his foot and he had one right away—”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m not her doctor,” I snapped. “How should I know why they scheduled it at seven?”

  “Fine. I was only asking. I’m just concerned,” said Margo, sitting back between Will and Elsa. “Don’t bite my head off.”

  Too late, I thought. I turned around and faced forward, my blood pounding. Why did Margo have to pry? Then again, that was the way she was—obnoxious. Of course Stella wanted to be here, way, way deep down. But she was barely speaking to me or to anybody. There was no way she was ready to be a cheerleader for the team she’d started, organized, and now couldn’t be on.

  Since I’d stepped up and become a real team member instead of just Stella’s tagalong friend, I’d gotten to know the team a little bit better—but not much. We’d posed for pictures, we’d sent hundreds of texts, we’d trotted around school and our neighborhoods, begging for donations and pledges. We’d even spent an entire Saturday afternoon at the supermarket, bagging groceries and asking for donations. Despite all that, we hadn’t exactly bonded.

  In fact, some people had gotten really competitive about the bagging. It was annoying. Margo started campaigning the minute someone stepped into the store—“Pick me! Check out in lane three!”—and Autumn and Alex were no better, acting like the Homecoming Queen and King they were.

  I was a better bagger—before my McDonald’s job, I worked one summer at a pharmacy where I bagged plenty of odd-shaped stuff—but they got all the customers.

  Life. So unfair.

  Cameron leaned over from his spot against the window. “You know what I realized when we picked you up?” he asked. “Our house matches yours. Same colors. Same size, everything.”

  “Really? You live in the same development?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I live in Sector Ten. Otherwise known as Landing Lane. It’s a copy of your block, right down to the mailbox stripes. It’s so fake.” He shook his head. “It kills me.”

  I laughed. “I know,” I agreed. “It’s like a set for a really boring movie.”

  “Revenge of the Vacuum Cleaner. Crime in the Cul-de-Sac,” Cameron said.

  I laughed again. Cameron was a funny writer—I knew that from working on yearbook with him. Not that yearbook was my thing, exactly. I was just following orders to get involved in activities for my college applications.

  I didn’t think working on yearbook and working at McDonald’s was going to score me any points, though. I’d have to kick it up a notch over the summer and fall semester of senior year. I was so dreading that. I liked my little noninvolved world.

  Cameron held out a small bag toward me. “Try one? They’re protein-and-carb cubes. Great for energy.”

  “Oh, um, sure.” I recognized the brand as one that Stella liked, too. I’d take all the help I could get. I popped one into my mouth and chewed slowly, the lemonade-glazed gel glob dissolving in my mouth. It was horrible. How did anyone eat these? I took a sip from my water bottle to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. “How long until we get to Bangor?”

  Cameron glanced at his phone. “Three hours. Enjoy.” He slipped his earbuds back in and closed his eyes, leaning his head against the window. He definitely was not a morning person. When we’d had first-period biology together, he often ran in fifteen minutes late and would have to clean up after labs to make up for it, so Mr. Bamford wouldn’t report him to the main office. I don’t think he cared about having to do clean-up. He seemed to think it was a fair trade for getting to come in late.

  I looked out the window, feeling the familiar pang I got whenever I left town.

  We crossed the roads where I’d gone on training rides over the past few weeks—some with Mason, and some by myself. He was always patient about the fact that I was slow on hills (well, slow everywhere, actually), even though it must have driven him crazy to wait for me. He’d ride to the top, then coast down beside me and climb once more, but at my pace. He never said anything critical, unless it was about the dumb things Stella and I did when we were little, or the fact that I wore jeans and long-sleeved shirts for rides.

  I didn’t feel comfortable wearing all that cycling gear. It just highlighted how much I wasn’t a real cyclist yet, unlike the rest of them. It also meant I nearly drowned in my own sweat once or twice.

  I’d since forced myself to buy a couple of pairs of long biking shorts that had a padded liner so my butt wouldn’t hurt after the first ten miles—but they weren’t the skin-tight look; that was just the inner layer. The outer layer was baggy and black. Along with those, I had on a bike jersey, and in a small bag next to me were Stella’s old clip-on shoes, which she was lending me. We wore the same size, which was lucky. In the meantime I was wearing flip-flops.

  I gazed at the river we were crossing, where a rower in a single scull was headed upstream, oars cutting through the early-morning fog that hung over the water.

  Stella and I had canoed the same river the summer before. We’d packed a lunch, planned the place where her dad would pick us up, and drifted downstream blasting music from our phones and singing along. We’d gotten sunburned, eaten by mosquitoes, and nearly swamped by a powerboat full of men who whistled at us until we told them we were sixteen and paddled quickly to shore.

  It had been the best day of the whole summer.

  Now, I reached into my jersey’s back pocket for my phone, hoping against hope that Stella had sent me an encouraging “good-bye and good luck” text.

  Nope.

  I’d just barely been allowed to visit her and say good-bye the night before.

  “So you’re really going,” she’d said in a flat voice.

  “Well, yeah. I told you I would. Maybe I don’t always follow through on things, but this time I’m going to,” I said. “I promised you, right?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you?”

  She had acted as if she had no memory of this, when I’d told her at least five times that I would do the ride for her and wouldn’t bail no matter what happened. I’d promised her I’d do it without letting anyone know how badly hurt she was, too. Either she didn’t remember some of our conversations in the hospital, or else she didn’t care enough to pay attention.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. We should have been traveling together; if we were, we’d have been packing our bags at each other’s houses and laughing and imagining all the ridiculous things that might happen on the trip. We’d have packed too many things. We’d have stayed up too late and crashed in her parents’ minivan the next morning on the way to the start.

  But there wasn’t any of that. There was only a weird interaction with her not making eye contact, not looking up, staring out the window. She was suffering, and I couldn’t help her.

  “So I hope everything goes okay while I’m gone,” I’d said to her. “And I’ll make sure I get pictures of all the team so you can see how things go on the ride.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  When I finally made it out the door, crying, Mason had run after me. “Sorry. She just . . . she’s not herself,” he said.

  “She hates me,” I said.

  “Don’t take it personally. She hates everything right now,” he said.

  “I can’t blame her. I would, too. I’d probably hate me, too, but I’m really doing this for her.”

  “Try to have a good time if you can, and don’t freak out. You’ll be fine.”

  “If you consider fine crashing and totaling my bike, then yeah,” I joked.

  He looked a bit shocked by my choice of words, and his face reddened as he stopped beside me, flustered.

  “No, I—God, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” he said quickly. “I know you didn’t.”

  We’d been spending so much time together that we were beginning to understand each other. We were both trying to get Stella past this awful stage, these terrible weeks. We both knew that some of what Stella’s parents were saying and doing
was driving her—and us—crazy. They wouldn’t let any of us out of their sight without huge promises and explanations. Mason and I had both been covering for Stella, making sure she was all alone for as long as she wanted to be, but not so alone that she got lonely or desperate.

  The night was so silent. I could hear frogs in the pond behind their house, peeping so loudly that it seemed they must be having conversations.

  “Sorry. I’m so stupid.” I shook my head. “Some things aren’t funny anymore.”

  “Lots of things,” added Mason. “Actually.”

  I nodded, brushing my wet eyes with my fingers, trying to pull it together.

  “Don’t worry about the ride, or being gone for a week. Stella will be fine, and you’ll do okay. You are kind of in shape.”

  “Kind of? Thanks,” I said, shoving him.

  “Now it’s time to take your little wings and fly.” Mason patted me on the head like I was a toddler, the way he always did when he wanted to aggravate me. He was only two years older, but at times he tried to make it seem as if it were five.

  I brushed his hand away, but instead of letting go, we both held on for a few seconds. It felt odd, but at the same time comfortable. “There will be no flying, okay?”

  Mason and I looked at each other like: Are we supposed to hug good-bye now or something? Because we didn’t usually hug, unless it was a tackling move when we were in elementary school and we all fought like cats and dogs over swords and lightsabers.

  “We used to always say this thing when I was on the track team at Sparrowsdale. I think of it when I go running. It’s kind of annoying, but my coach would always say, ‘Fly like you mean it.’ So, fly like you mean it, Frances.” Mason let go of my hand, gave me a fist bump, and then walked away.

  I’d felt super sad as I looked back at the house, the chili pepper mini-lights that would normally be in Stella’s room, but were now on the first floor, in the den, which was her bedroom for the time being. It was like a hospital room inside a house. She was still in recovery mode, and nobody could say how much longer it might take. “Her incisions practically have incisions,” was what her father had told me the last time I visited. “I don’t want her risking an infection. We’ll have to be patient.”